Angelina Moss

"I wanted to go beyond standards to make sure that what I'm doing is effective for our students."

Angelina Moss’s classroom is a place of wonder.

Day after day, she’s up on her feet delivering lessons with as much creativity as she can muster.

Making Venn diagrams out of hula hoops. Singing songs about the days of the week.

Helping kids who fear reading find the perfect book.

“Last year, we were able to read Wait Till Helen Comes. One of my favorite tools is Reader’s Theatre. The kids get excited about the activity, and that makes them so excited to read the book.”

It’s an incredibly wholehearted way to live and work, though it wasn’t that way for Angelina at first.

“I always wanted to be involved with children. I enrolled in FSU to be a child psychologist, but that quickly changed to social science education. I know my heart, and I was afraid to get to attached to the kids. I changed to teaching because I figured I’d have so many loves that I wouldn’t get be so affected by this particular one, or that particular one,” she says with a twinkle in her eye.

“That didn’t quite work out the way I planned.”

Angelina got her degree in May 2010, and was working at Catapult Academy by August.

It wasn’t long until she landed a job at a dropout intervention program, where those human connections happened almost instantly. She spent more than two years coaching students between the ages of 16-21, helping them earn a diploma or GED.

A school closure led her to DePaul, where she began teaching and earned her Masters Degree in Educational Instruction right after the birth of her first son in 2015.

“I love learning. I wanted to be a better teacher. Here, I wanted to bring definite structure to my curriculum, going beyond just standards to make sure it was effective for our students. I do the best I can to teach the students and keep them on track. Today, I can plan more to what the students need, and apply strategies to the way they learn, using methods that help them to get it.

The hardest part of my job is there aren’t enough hours in the day. I wish I had more time to reach every child’s need.